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At Linden Street Brewery in West Oakland, a red lager is fermenting inside a shiny kettle that looks sort of like a giant, silver crayon on its head. Nearby, co-owner Adam Lamoreaux surveys a drum-shaped cauldron in need of some scrubbing.

“Brewing is a whole lot more cleaning than actually making beer,” says Lamoreaux.

Lamoreaux, 38, is a mellow former Navy engineer with a shaved head and a Rasputin beard dangling over his collar. His wife hates it, but the beard's a charm, safe from the razor until the day Linden Street Brewery, which opened in 2009, stops growing.

The East Bay has been experiencing something of a wine boom over the past decade or so and the East Bay Express devotes this week’s edition to exploring it in the Taste Edition. There are now at least 25 wineries in East Bay cities. Ellen Cushing wrote about them and their history. She spoke with KALW’s Holly Kernan about wine culture in the East Bay.

In California, there are hundreds if not thousands of people practicing criminal law, though they’ve never passed a bar exam. They don’t wear suits. They don’t have secretaries. And they can’t bill for their time. They’re called Jailhouse Lawyers. They’re inmates who pursue the equivalent of a lawyer’s education and who work as lawyers from within prison walls.